The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine

by David Brock

  BLACKBURN: So you’re a partner in Kleiner Perkins. Okay. Now, they have invested about a billion dollars in forty companies that are going to benefit from cap-and-trade legislation. So is the legislation that we are discussing here today, is that something that you are going to personally benefit from?

  GORE: I believe that the transition to a green economy is good for our economy and good for all of us, and I have invested in it. But every penny that I have made, I have put right into a nonprofit, the Alliance for Climate Protection, to spread awareness of why we have to take on this challenge.

  And Congresswoman, if you’re—if you believe that the reason I have been working on this issue for thirty years is because of greed, you don’t know me.

  BLACKBURN: Sir, I’m not making accusations, I’m asking questions that have been asked of me and individuals—constituents that were seeking a point of clarity, so I am asking you for that point of—point of clarity.

  GORE: I understand exactly what you’re doing, Congresswoman. Everybody here does.

  BLACKBURN: And, well—you know, are you willing to divest yourself of any profit? Does all of it go to a not-for-profit that is an educational not-for-profit—

  GORE: Every penny that I have made—

  BLACKBURN: Every penny—

  GORE:—has gone to it. Every penny from the movie, from the book, from any investments in renewable energy. I’ve been willing to put my money where my mouth is. Do you think there’s something wrong with being active in business in this country?

  BLACKBURN: I am simply asking for clarification—

  GORE: I’m proud of it.

  BLACKBURN: —of the relationship.

  GORE: I’m proud of it.50

  While Ingraham painted the former vice president as a profiteer, Gore testified that he had given all of his earnings from green investments to nonprofits. Even after these false attacks on Gore were noted by many in the media, Bill O’Reilly was still promoting them weeks later, teasing a segment by saying, “Al Gore is becoming extremely wealthy with all this global warming stuff.” He added, “I believe that [Gore] is profiting by the green movement.”51

  This is the pattern Fox News follows on nearly every political issue: latch on to a conservative “fact” and broadcast it ad nauseam, even after it is proven false. Unlike with health care reform, conservatives were able to block President Obama’s climate bill. Fox News played a vital role in the fight, turning the protection of big oil polluters into a populist cause.

  Both battles demonstrated Fox’s domination of the conservative movement. By pushing phony controversies such as death panels and Climategate into the mainstream, Fox News could shift the national conversation and influence conservatives all over the country, who trusted their favorite “news” network far more than any of their elected leaders.

  The promotion of misleading ACORN tapes should have served as a warning to the media that Fox News could not be trusted. But fresh off the firing of Van Jones, traditional media outlets were not ready to accept this truth. Fox was still a “sister” news organization. This only encouraged the network to seek out more targets to attack.

  At the end of September, Sean Hannity focused his energy on attacking an Obama appointee named Kevin Jennings, who served as assistant deputy secretary for the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools at the U.S. Department of Education. Jennings had been a leader for nearly two decades in the fight to ensure that LGBT students had a safe school environment. As a teacher at Concord Academy in Massachusetts, Jennings founded the nation’s first gay-straight alliance. He went on to cofound the Gay and Lesbian Independent School Teacher Network—later renamed the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN)—in Boston in 1990 and grew it into a national organization. Following that success, Jennings was appointed by Republican governor William Weld to chair the Education Committee of the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth in 1992. He had also authored several books on his experience as a gay teacher, and most people considered him highly qualified for his new position in the administration.

  On September 18, just days after ACORN’s funding was stripped by Congress, Hannity quizzed his guests asking, “Who do you think is the most dangerous [czar]?” Republican strategist Noelle Nikpour responded, “Well, I think it’s Kevin Jennings. Not only that, that he’s a gay activist, but he was part of the GLSEN. He was the former director for GLSEN. They held a conference in which techniques for, I think it was, homosexuality, how to perform different techniques. That’s insane.” The Wall Street Journal editorial board member Stephen Moore then chimed in: “Remember, we—used to be that sex education was putting condoms on bananas. Lord knows what they’re going to do now.”52

  A week later, Hannity took his case against Jennings further, claiming that “this is a guy that’s advocated promoting homosexuality in schools. This is a guy we have talked about his past. He’s had contempt for religion, et cetera, et cetera … Isn’t the issue here that what they’re teaching oftentimes, value-wise, contradicts what parents are teaching? And isn’t that morally wrong?”53

  Glenn Beck had received a huge boost in prominence following Van Jones’s resignation. Sean Hannity now wanted a scalp of his own, and the rest of Fox News was happy to assist. During a segment on Fox & Friends, Brian Kilmeade claimed that Jennings wrote “a report on how he did not report an incident with an underage student who had sex with an older man, and also has expressed contempt for religion.”54

  FoxNews.com also got in on the act, describing Jennings as a “former schoolteacher who has advocated promoting homosexuality in schools, written about his past drug abuse, expressed his contempt for religion and detailed an incident in which he did not report an underage student who told him he was having sex with older men.”55

  This charge, like the “truther” allegation against Jones, escalated the anti-Jennings campaign into a full-fledged controversy. Led by Fox News, right-wing pundits and media outlets pushed the claim that two decades earlier, when Jennings was a twenty-four-year-old teacher at Concord Academy, he “cover[ed] up statutory rape” by not reporting a conversation he had with a student who told him about a relationship he had with an “older man.”56

  But the accusation was a lie; at the time of the conversation, the student in question was old enough to give his legal consent, making the statutory rape charge impossible. Additionally, the former student credited Jennings with helping him through a difficult period.

  “Since I was of legal consent at the time, the fifteen-minute conversation I had with Mr. Jennings twenty-one years ago is of nobody’s concern but his and mine,” the former student said. “However, since the Republican noise machine is so concerned about my ‘well-being’ and that of America’s students, they’ll be relieved to know that I was not ‘inducted’ into homosexuality, assaulted, raped, or sold into sexual slavery.”

  He continued, “In 1988, I had taken a bus home for the weekend, and on the return trip met someone who was also gay. The next day, I had a conversation with Mr. Jennings about it. I had no sexual contact with anybody at the time, though I was entirely legally free to do so. I was a sixteen-year-old going through something most of us have experienced: adolescence. I find it regrettable that the people who have the compassion and integrity to protect our nation’s students are themselves in need of protection from homophobic smear attacks.

  “Were it not for Mr. Jennings’ courage and concern for my well-being at that time in my life, I doubt I’d be the proud gay man that I am today,”57 he concluded.

  While the attacks on Jennings continued, they had lost their punch. The Atlantic reported,

  A few weeks ago, Kevin Jennings was in trouble. After social conservatives at the Family Research Council had opposed his nomination as director of the Education Department’s Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools earlier in the year, he came under a firestorm of criticism from conservative bloggers and Fox News pundits for counseling an underage student—a 15-year-old b
oy, it was reported—on a sexual relationship with an older man … While the fire hasn’t completely died down—53 House Republicans sent a letter calling for his job last week—it has certainly lost steam. Jennings is no longer a topic du jour, mostly due to one simple fact: the boy wasn’t actually underage.58

  Before the Jennings episode, Fox News was more powerful than ever and the media felt obligated to pay attention to the network’s attacks. When Fox’s overreach was exposed, reporters and producers at other news organizations began to realize that stories on the network deserved extra scrutiny before they committed resources to covering them. Unfortunately, this belief was not universal. While some would heed the warning of the Jennings fiasco, others still gave Fox News the elevated platform of a nonpartisan media organization.

  Chapter 8

  Willie Horton … Times a Thousand

  There was a breakdown in the system, and it is being addressed. But it must say something about the power of Fox, that a week after she resigned, we’re still talking about this.

  —Fox News vice president Michael Clemente

  After investigations cleared ACORN of any wrongdoing, at that moment, Andrew Breitbart’s credibility in the press should have evaporated. If that wasn’t the case, James O’Keefe’s arrest in January 2010, after entering Democratic senator Mary Landrieu’s office on false pretenses, should have made the rest of the media seriously doubt the journalistic integrity of Breitbart’s operation.

  Breitbart owned the “life rights” to O’Keefe’s work. As such, he shared some responsibility—if not legal, then at least ethical—for the actions of his protégé. But even O’Keefe’s criminal stunt in Louisiana wasn’t enough for the media to write off Breitbart, whose talent for finding, or inventing, potentially explosive stories was too ratings-worthy to pass up.

  Breitbart was finally exposed in July after he launched a racially tinged attack on Shirley Sherrod, an employee at the Department of Agriculture. In a posting on his Big Government website, Breitbart wrote:

  We are in possession of a video from [sic] in which Shirley Sherrod, USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development, speaks at the NAACP Freedom Fund dinner in Georgia. In her meandering speech to what appears to be an all-black audience, this federally appointed executive bureaucrat lays out in stark detail, that her federal duties are managed through the prism of race and class distinctions.

  In the first video, Sherrod describes how she racially discriminates against a white farmer. She describes how she is torn over how much she will choose to help him. And, she admits that she doesn’t do everything she can for him, because he is white. Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help. But she decides that he should get help from “one of his own kind.” She refers him to a white lawyer.1

  While that was the story that the video appeared to tell, it was not the full truth. Unfortunately, the White House had not learned its lesson about Breitbart and forced Sherrod to resign on the same day the video was posted. Fox News had pounced on the story already, failing to obtain the full video and jumping to conclusions about its significance.

  Fox News framed the story around the NAACP’s contention that elements of the Tea Party movement were racist. FoxNews.com reported, “Days after the NAACP clashed with Tea Party members over allegations of racism, a video has surfaced showing an Agriculture Department official regaling an NAACP audience with a story about how she withheld help to a white farmer facing bankruptcy.”2

  A little more than two and a half hours after Breitbart first posted his video, FoxNation.com’s top headline read, “Caught on Tape: Obama Official Discriminates Against White Farmer.” When Sherrod resigned, the headline was changed to read, “Obama Official Resigns After Discrimination Caught on Tape.”3 Both stories linked to Breitbart’s original story and video.

  At the tail end of his show that night, Bill O’Reilly said, “Sherrod was caught on tape saying something very disturbing. Seems a white farmer in Georgia had requested government assistance form Ms. Sherrod.” O’Reilly then commented, “That is simply unacceptable. And Ms. Sherrod must resign immediately.”4

  Fifteen minutes later, Sean Hannity reported that Sherrod “resigned just a short time ago after she was caught on tape appearing to tell an audience that she had used her position to racially discriminate against white farmers.”

  During the “Great American Panel” later in the show, Republican strategist Kate Obenshain said, “It’s just a shame that it takes an expose, it takes Breitbart having to put it on his website, for her resignation to be forced.” Obenshain was followed by Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund, who exclaimed, “Obviously no one complained at the Georgia NAACP. No one complained. It would have passed unless they had this video which came out now.”5 Under pressure, the NAACP issued a statement condemning Sherrod a little after nine in the evening.

  On Fox & Friends the next morning, Steve Doocy claimed Sherrod was caught “making a speech to the NAACP that sure sounded racist.” Alisyn Camerota added that Breitbart’s video showed Sherrod “touting this in this anecdote as though this is, you know, a feather in her cap, somehow, for her to be congratulated.” The hosts also decided the Sherrod tape was “Exhibit A” of “what racism looks like.” During their discussion, the on-screen text read, “RACISM CAUGHT ON CAMERA” and “USDA OFFICIAL ADMITS RACISM ON TAPE; FORCED TO RESIGN AFTER DICEY VIDEO LEAKS.”6

  That morning, CNN hosted Sherrod to respond to the charges against her. After she told her side of the story, host John Roberts said, “Miss Sherrod, let’s make it clear, though, that this happened twenty-four years ago. You eventually worked with this white farmer. You eventually became friends, you say, with the farmer and his wife … So, the question I have is, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture came to you and said you have to step down, why didn’t you just say, wait a minute, you don’t know the full story. Here’s the full story, why should I step down?”

  Sherrod’s answer was telling: “I did say that, but they, for some reason, the stuff that Fox and the Tea Party does is scaring the administration.”7

  By nine in the morning, Fox News had started walking back the story, reporting, “Sherrod says that that story is about something that happened twenty-four years ago … and that she uses the story when speaking to groups to point out how racism can and needs to be overcome.”8

  As the day progressed, Breitbart and Fox’s story continued to unravel. In an appearance on CNN, the white farmer whom Sherrod spoke of in the video said that people who were calling her a racist “don’t know what they are talking about.”9

  Glenn Beck devoted the first twenty minutes of his show to the story, airing a clip of Sherrod’s CNN interview and asking if this “was a political assassination from the White House or from the NAACP.” Beck added, “Context matters, but we don’t have the full video. Andrew Breitbart is trying to get the full video.”10

  The network was in full retreat by 7 p.m., with host Bret Baier abruptly telling viewers, “Fox News didn’t even do the story. We didn’t do it on Special Report. We posted it online.”11

  At 7:45 p.m., the full video was released. Sherrod’s was a story of redemption, not racism. Instead of denying the white couple service, she had worked to save their farm and befriended them in the process. According to Sherrod, Fox News never contacted her for comment before running with the story.

  Sherrod didn’t hesitate to criticize Breitbart and Fox for playing the race game. “When you look at their reporting, this is just another way of seeing that they are [racist],” she said. “But I have seen that before now. I saw their reporting as biased during the Bush administration and the Clinton administration.”12

  In reality, there were several parties who wronged Sherrod: Breitbart and Fox News, the White House, and even the NAACP. Yet Sherrod’s hasty punishment had been instigated by the deceitful conservatives promoting the story.

  The network, clearly embarrassed, tried to rewrite the history of th
e Sherrod saga. “Fox News Channel did not touch this story until she had actually quit,”13 Steve Doocy insisted. Likewise, correspondent James Rosen stated that “the idea that Fox News was somehow a catalyzing agent in this” was a “myth.”14

  One Fox News personality, Shepard Smith, was honest about the incident and implicitly criticized the rest of the network. “We here at Studio B did not run the video and did not reference the story in any way for many reasons, among them: We didn’t know who shot it, we didn’t know when it was shot, we didn’t know the context of the statement, and because of the history of the videos on the site where it was posted,” Smith stated. “In short, we do not and did not trust the source.”15

  Eventually, Fox News admitted that running with Breitbart’s story was a mistake. In an interview with Politico, Fox News vice president Michael Clemente said, “There was a breakdown in the system, and it is being addressed. But it must say something about the power of Fox, that a week after she resigned, we’re still talking about this.”16 It did say something about the power of Fox to slander a woman and nearly destroy her life.

  Roger Ailes’s work on the Nixon and George H. W. Bush campaigns, Bill Sammon’s search for racial subtext in Barack Obama’s writings, and Glenn Beck’s statement that the president was “a racist” all demonstrate a willingness among the network’s employees to engage in race baiting. The Shirley Sherrod story simply followed in line with these despicable incidents. However, she was not alone.

  With Roger Ailes’s history of using race as a political weapon, it’s no surprise the network would employ the same tactics. During the 2008 campaign, statements of President Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, were played ad nauseam on the network, delivering the message to viewers that while Obama positioned himself as a post-racial candidate, he had a murky past.